The Mount Sinai Health System today announced that Lisa M. Satlin, MD, the Herbert H. Lehman Professor of Pediatrics and Chair of the Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Pediatrician-in-Chief of Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, has been named the 2026 recipient of the American Society of Pediatric Nephrology (ASPN) Founders’ Award. The honor recognizes a lifetime of outstanding contributions to pediatric nephrology through research, education, clinical care, and leadership.

A review finds increasing evidence that obesity and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are biologically linked. The researchers highlight shared early metabolic disruptions involving mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation and abnormal signaling from fat tissue, which can affect brain health long before symptoms appear. The research also points to the gut-brain axis as a contributor to neurodegeneration. Together, the findings suggest AD risk may begin earlier than previously thought and support a shift toward whole-body, metabolic-focused prevention.

J. Craig Venter, the genomicist whose work redrew the architecture of modern biology, died on 29 April 2026 in San Diego at the age of 79, following complications from treatment of a recently diagnosed cancer. Brain Health, a new peer-reviewed journal launched today by Genomic Press, publishes in its inaugural issue a scientific tribute by Dr. Julio Licinio that foregrounds a part of Venter’s legacy that other obituaries have understandably treated as background: his earliest major methodological breakthrough emerged at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, where he pioneered the expressed sequence tag as a route to rapidly identifying brain-expressed genes. The tribute traces an arc from that neuroscience starting point through the first complete bacterial genome, the parallel pursuit of the human sequence, large-scale ocean metagenomics, and the construction of the first cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome.